Fuck You I Won’t Tidy My Bedroom: Rage Against the Machine versus The X-Factor

So, the planet’s on fire and our former Prime Minister appears to be an unabashed war criminal, but let’s turn our attention to what really matters, shall we? Namely, the controversy currently raging over whether this year’s UK Christmas number one will be a stage-managed triumph of mass manipulation, or whether it’ll be the winner of this year’s X-Factor again.

Over 700,000 of you so far have pledged to protest at the X-Factor’s stranglehold on the festive music scene by sending Rage Against the Machine’s debut single to number one in time for Christmas. ‘Killing in the Name Of’ is an uncompromising, monolithic beast, rearing its head from the mists of the early Nineties. In a world that also contains the Muppets’ version of Bohemian Rhapsody, it seems an odd choice of challenger. Rage Against the Machine’s chosen vehicle was rap-rock, a clumsy Heath Robinson contraption that eventually collapsed under the baggy-shorted bourgeois weight of Limp Bizkit. As a genre it was never that appealing past the age of criminal responsibility, and I wonder to what extent the pro-Rage campaign is imbued with as much affectionate nostalgia as indified indignation.

That said, I would love to see the seething boiling whirlpool of chips on the shoulder of the British public wash Rage Against the Machine to the top spot, there to earnestly quote Franz Fanon at their enemies until they give in, sobbing, and promise to buy Fair Trade. What I would point out, however, is that the same record label, Sony, is behind both acts. So it’s a purely cosmetic exercise – but okay, let it be one. The principle stands that getting Rage Against The Machine to number one is a symbolic stretching of the standing-up muscles, a semi-Situationist prank, and also that rarest of commodities: a laugh. I can’t do better than this here post at explaining why. The pro-Rage campaign mines a deep seam of appreciation for throwing a spanner in the socio-cultural works. And if it’s possible to harness this collective urge to act purely in the interests of what is known as the lolz, then I’d rather it were done for a purpose more amusing and less terminally embarrassing than, say, the election to Mayor of Boris Johnson.

‘Killing in the Name Of’ has been validly criticised as sludgily, tinnily adolescent, and yes, the massed uniform stomp in defence of self-determination that makes up its petulant chorus is indeed a contradiction in terms. Well done. Enough joyless fuckers have stressed that latter argument, in the same smug and point-missing manner as people so pleased with themselves for having spotted the ironic double-negative in ‘We don’t need no education‘ that they mention it every single time they hear the song, like Pavlov’s dog doing A-level English Lit.

Rage are, of course, much more than their most irritatingly and counterproductively lowest-common-denominator work might suggest. You wouldn’t judge Radiohead on ‘Creep’, or the Manics on ‘A Design For Life’, or poor brave Kylie on ‘I Should Be So Lucky’, would you? Oh, you would? Fair enough then, I’ll see you at the Damon Albarn Country House theme park. The Phil Daniels novelty wheelbarras of condescending moribund Mockney cliche are on me. If you wouldn’t, there’s always this or this or this or this.

A disclaimer: at a formative age, I caught Rage’s 1993 appearance at Lollapollooza, where the band’s response to censorship of music by the batshit-insane Parents’ Music Resource Center was to appear onstage naked but for some strategically placed strips of duct tape. That sight made such an impact that, for ages afterwards, I confused righteous political indignation with near-unsuppressable sexual attraction, to the equal bemusement of my previous boyfriends and the local Revolutionary Communist Party by-election canvassers. Speaking less self-parodically and more seriously, I have also spent a streak of my previous New Year’s Eves in a sticky-floored, damp-ceilinged dive deep in the bowels of Cardiff known as Metro’s, a club more grot than grotto. Metro’s would redeem itself for this one night by a) handing out free tea and toast in the early hours when not even our hardest Valleys Commando could face another triple JD in an indelibly-smeared glass, and more importantly b) at the stroke of midnight, segueing ‘Auld Lang’s Ayne’ into ‘Killing in the Name Of’. It was glorious.

So, at least half of my Rage associations are seasonal, and I have what might euphemistically be termed a soft spot for them. How do I feel about the prospect of their being the Christmas number one? I really don’t think I feel any way at all. Anyone who believes the end-of-year charts to be anything other than a cesspit of cashing in and brand consolidation, a cold-eyed tying up of old rope left dangling by the previous twelve months’ worth of cash-cows, is so touchingly naive that I’d like to have them round to dinner and watch It’s A Wonderful Life. If Rage Against the Machine are made the Christmas number one, it will prove nothing and convert nobody, and Sony will make a killing either way. The collective impetus to make one’s voice heard in this particularly pointless arena is sadly unlikely to translate into participation in, say, next year’s general election. Or at least not unless some enterprising soul decides to exhume Screaming Lord Sutch.

What it will do, however, is demonstrate that there still exists a demographic which clings limpet-like to the hull of bloody-mindedness, prepared to momentarily stir themselves in the interests of nudging the seat of mainstream popularity with a heated toasting-fork. And that, in a society of spectacles and an age of diminishing expectations, is about all we can hope for. Do your duty.